Meaningless statement. 2 centimeters in a different direction and it would have passed by harmlessly. So?

It's not meaningless. It means all of the events, trauma, experiences, emotions resulting in this strike would not have happened and the ripples in the lives of those affected would not have happened.

I had a boss once that closed up late, got in his car, and got on the interstate to go home. He was decapitated by a oncoming semi-truck's rim that had broken off, crossed over the median and slammed into his windshield, killing him instantly.

Think about the accuracy involved and all of the things that had to line up to make that happen. And think about all the things that happened because he died and the ripples of effects that spread out through the lives of everyone affected.

It means all of the events, trauma, experiences, emotions resulting in this strike would not have happened and the ripples in the lives of those affected would not have happened.

But that is always happening, whether something actually happens in the end or not. How many times did an arrow fall harmlessly to the ground? It's news here because it hit an child. But it's not news that a small deviation would have caused more (or less) harm. That is typical and is happening constantly.

You see this turn of phrase frequently in stories of this sort -- an 'innocent' bystander getting injured by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's become a favored journalistic cliche.

What does innocence have to do with it, and what would it mean in this context to say a little girl in her situation was guilty of something? I suppose it's the concept of blamelessness that the word is intended to invoke, but the context renders the entire idea an oxymoron. The real sting comes from the randomness of the victim -- it could have been anyone -- but that's not an idea that 'innocence' calls to mind.

If the person who shot the arrow had selected his victim for a reason, the little girl would almost certainly still be blameless even though the shooting would no longer be random. But we'd want to know why she was selected as the victim to form a judgment about what was really going on. 'Innocence' would remain an odd fit to describe the situation since it draws the wrong kind of contrast.

From the X-Ray in the story, it looks as if the arrow came down at a reasonably steep angle. Given the arrow type and length, one might be able to make a good estimate of the power of the bow and hence the range it was fired from. If it can be ascertained the position of the girl when she was struck, say by the position of her doll stroller, then that would give the azimuth from which the shot was fired.

All of this might be enough to get this down to a reasonably small area. Knock on all the doors and ask who shoots a bow in his back yard.

The whole story reminds me a bit of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Deadeye Dick.

But it would have followed a different trajectory and likely missed her altogether.

This does remind me of the time when I was in grad school and a bullet went through the window of an office on the 10th floor. The windows were double-paned, so you could use the two holes (and the hole in the ceiling) to ascertain where the bullet came from. Not sure if anyone was ever arrested, however.

Once a motorcycle fell from the sky and bounced off the dashboard of the truck I was in, missing me by less than a foot. Strange what can happen in this world. The motorcyclist ended up in the bed of the truck, dazed but intact.

There was a case in Chicago a few years back where a homeless man was killed via an arrow on Lower Wacker Drive. I believe it remains unsolved. He got wacked on Wacker. Maybe there's a serial killer out there.

My reaction to this was "Holy cow I'm so glad I never killed anyone when I was a kid" because that was exactly the kind of stuff I did, i.e. shooting off homemade weapons haphazardly. I made bows, catapults, mortars, rockets, etc., all fired off with little consideration about what was downrange.